The place to search for Windows apps compatibility in WINE is from appdb.winehq.org. If you’re thinking about switching to Linux, that’s a site you should have in your bookmarks because you’ll probably be referring to it periodically.

The AppDB on the winehq.org web site is also the easiest way to participate in the Linux community without having to know how to program anything. All the reviews in there on whether certain Windows apps work or not are written by everyday users like you, so if you have some spare time and want to contribute in a meaningful way without writing a line of code, now you know how.

The video below shows an example of how to use the AppDB; it’s very easy. Even if you’re on a Windows or Mac box right now, you can still use it since it’s all web-based.

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How To See Compatible Windows Apps In WINE (Linux)

“Okay, no big deal” you tell yourself. “It’s a pretty old piece of software and it’s probably not designed to be used with modern hardware.”  You figure you can just take a look at some of the solutions online, check a few knowledge bases, maybe look on the forums (if there are any) for this particular product, and you’ll be good.

Unfortunately, nothing you do seems to make your issue any better. You change pretty much everything there is to change about the program and it still won’t run properly. You’re at the end of your rope and all you want to do is play. And you should be able to! Your system is beastly! 

That’s your problem.

Try changing the core affinity of the program. Older games (I’m talking 1990s-era) aren’t made for modern processing hardware. In many cases, the program has absolutely no idea how to manage multiple cores. It’s like going back to the middle ages and giving a peasant a book on Quantum physics. It just doesn’t work.

As a last-ditch effort (once nothing else works, mind you) try setting your game to use only one core.

Here’s how to do it (note that you’ll have to be logged on to your administrative account:

1. Run the program: You need to do this in order to set its processor affinity.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to open the task manager and navigate to the “Processes” tab.  
3. Click “Show Processes from All Users”: This is necessary for enabling administrative controls in Task Manager. In most cases, if you attempt to set affinity without performing this step, you’ll receive an “access denied” error message.
4. Find the process related to your program: If you’re not sure what it’s called, go to the “Applications” tab and find the program. Right click on it and click on “show process” in the context menu that pops up.
5. Right click on the process and click “Select Affinity.” 
6. Deselect all but one of the cores. 

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How to Change Processor Affinity In Windows 7

One thing I find really annoying is that when first putting something into a folder,the default under the view tab is for Auto-arrange icons, which I never want to do.Is there a way to get around that?

The standard way to set a default icon arrangement since Windows 95 all the way to present is to click View, then Arrange Icons By and then select which arrangement you want. After that, Windows will remember the setting for future folder windows…

…unless you have a cleaning utility that clears out that setting.

For example, the popular CCleaner utility has advanced setting to clear out Windows Size/Location Cache:

If that box is checked, the sort order/arrangement setting you selected previously will be reset, usually to auto-arrange, so if you don’t want that setting cleared and are using CCleaner, uncheck the Window Size/Location Cache checkbox so your settings are kept.

If you’re not using CCleaner but are using some other utility to "clean" your Windows, check the options to see if there’s anything that affects window locations, menu sort order and things of that nature. If there is and the utility is clearing/resetting those settings when you run it, that’s probably what’s making Windows "forget" your settings to begin with.

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How To Set Default Icon Arrangement So That Windows Remembers It

Or words to that effect.

When you use an operating system long enough, you will inevitably be drawn into the world of the black-as-night zero-graphic command line. In Windows it’s known as the Command Prompt and in Mac or Linux as simply the Terminal – but I’m going to concentrate on Windows here.

The reason for using the Command Prompt is simple as it allows for doing certain things faster. And of course you really can’t call yourself a computer geek (for desktop OSes, anyway) unless you dabble at the command line from time to time.

1. Quickly changing to your desktop folder

On the command line, the desktop is a folder just like any other folder in Windows. Sometimes you may drag and drop something on the desktop but then want to access that folder at the prompt. The way to do this quickly is by using the USERPROFILE environment variable.

How it’s done:

CD %USERPROFILE%\Desktop
[Press Enter]

Why you do it:

Requires far less typing, and doesn’t require you to know what your host drive letter is. If you were to do it the "manual" way, you’d have to type out the host drive letter, full path including spaces if any, and well.. it just takes a while. Using USERPROFILE is a whole lot quicker.

2. Getting your computer’s assigned local IP address

Windows as well as other operating systems for some reason really make it difficult to find the local IP address assigned to your computer. I mean, sure, with most wireless software utilities it will tell you up front, but for wired it requires a little digging.

This command is one you’ve probably used before, IPCONFIG.

How it’s done:

IPCONFIG
[Press Enter]

or

IPCONFIG /ALL
[Press Enter]

IPCONFIG alone will give you a short summary, and IPCONFIG with the /ALL flag gives you verbose information.

Why you do it:

IPCONFIG is especially useful for those who have multiple computers/consoles/etc. connected to your home network that are assigned dynamically. When you want to troubleshoot, you need to know the IP of each device connected so you can PING to test connectivity between Windows machines.

Another reason to know the local IP of a Windows machine is when the network sharing for whatever reason stops working by machine name (this is especially true for pre-Vista PCs that periodically "lose" their names over a wireless network).

For example, if you’re trying to reach a Windows share over the network and the address \\NETWORK-NAME-HERE doesn’t work, \\192.168.0.5 or whatever the IP of the box with the share on it will.

3. An easier-reading trace-route using PATHPING

When you want to find every step your computer takes in order to reach a network destination, the standard method is to use TRACERT. You can try this at the prompt by typing TRACERT www.pcmech.com. What happens is that a series of "hops" happens and you will see every computer (server) that’s contacted in order to reach the destination.

PATHPING is a combination of both PING and TRACERT, and it’s usually faster on execution.

How it’s done:

PATHPING www.pcmech.com
[Press Enter]

(Note: You can use any web site or local destination you want. If using a local destination, PATHPING the machine name or IP address of the device on your network.)

Why you do it:

PATHPING gives you all the information in a more human-friendly layout and it’s usually speedier.

4. Listing all your services

Ordinarily when you want to see the services running in Windows, people are used to looking at the Services window, however you can administrate services completely from the command prompt using SC (service controller).

How it’s done:

There are a boatload of different ways to use SC, however what you probably want is just a list of everything. How to do that is:

SC QUERY
[Press Enter]

Your command window will be instantly flooded with a ton of text. If you want that text to be placed in an editable text file, execute the following:

CD %USERPROFILE%\Desktop
[Press Enter]
SC QUERY > sc.txt
[Press Enter]

This will output SC QUERY to the file sc.txt and be placed directly on your desktop. Being it’s a text file, on double-click it will open with Notepad by default.

Why you do it:

If anyone ever asks you what services you have running in an attempt to troubleshoot your computer, now you know how to output the whole list to a text file, suitable for posting in forums, sending in email, etc.

More info on how SC works is here if you want to read up on it.

5. Restarting your computer

Windows for whatever reason has never really made it easy to, y’know, restart the stupid thing. "No, I don’t want to SHUT DOWN, I want to RESTART… c’mon Windows.. work with me, here."

At the prompt, you can use the SHUTDOWN command with -R to execute a system restart. And to make it shutdown quick, use the -T (timer) with 1 second.

How it’s done:

SHUTDOWN -R -T 1

The above literally translates to, "Shutdown with a restart, wait 1 second to do it after command executes".

Why you do it:

Ever wish you could have a "restart" icon right on your desktop instead of fumbling around in menus to do the same thing? You can if you set up the above as a desktop Windows shortcut. Here’s how:

1. Right-click on any empty area of the desktop
2. From the menu that appears, hover over New and then Shortcut.
3. From the window that pops up, type in the command as SHUTDOWN -R -T 1 and click OK.

An icon will be placed on the desktop called shutdown. Right-click that, select Rename and rename it to Restart just for convenience’s sake. Any time you double-click that icon, the system will pause 1 second, then restart with no menu-fumbling required.

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Windows Command Line Goodness: 5 Easy Useful Commands

By default, on launch the tab you land on is "Everything", and it will show information like this:

Important note to laptop users: You may see certain run commands that look "weird". For example, the one above that would look weird to most people is "Persistence" and "HotKeysCmds". Both of these are from Intel and particular to my Dell netbook. More often than not you will see weird/odd entries on laptops compared to desktops.

Another one that probably looks out-of-place is OA012Mon, which is for the built-in webcam on my netbook’s LCD panel.

If you see anything in your run list that you’re not sure is safe or not, simply search for it on the internet and you will get the info you need on whether it’s safe.

When and when not to freak out if you find something "bad"

Seeing something like this from the "Drivers" tab may freak you out:

(note the "catchme" portion)

…until you do some research and find out it’s nothing to freak out about at all.

The point is that if you do find something that "looks bad", search it first online to confirm it is in fact something truly bad.

On a final note, Autoruns is not exactly what you’d called a beginner’s utility. It’s very detailed and for some may be a bit overwhelming. What I mean by this is to NOT go unchecking everything in there, as it may render your Windows inoperable. Simply use Autoruns to make sure everything on startup is exactly what should be there and nothing more.

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Cool Tool Of The Day: Autoruns

Although there’s a bunch of stuff that’s cool about Fx 10, there are 3 in particular that I feel stand out above the rest.

First is actually the release notes page itself. I’ve been waiting for Mozilla to do this a long time to make it very easy to tell me which update/fix applies to what, and now they have. It’s even color-coded. Nice touch. If you’re saying to yourself, “Well, that has nothing to do with the browser.” Yes, it does because it’s informational.

Second is something that will make a lot of people happy, “Most add-ons are now compatible with new versions of Firefox by default”. IT’S ABOUT TIME, MOZILLA. That whole upgrade-and-break-half-my-add-ons-in-the-process was getting really annoying. Fortunately, that’s now been nipped in the bud for the most part, and that’s great. This is the best reason to upgrade to Firefox 10, period.

Third is a real cool tool for developers, “Inspect Element”. Right click anywhere on any web page and you’ll see it as the last choice:

When you do that, you see both this:

(note the speech bubble telling you the CSS rule)

…and this at the bottom of the browser:

Very nice, very easy. Web developers will really like this.

I guess Firefox follows the same Formula Star Trek movies do where only the even-numbered releases are the good ones, because 10 is good.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Firefox 10 Released: 3 Cool Things About It

How to Formulate a Sound Backup Strategy

In order to formulate your backup plan, you should consider

• The data you wish to back up.
• The desired output location to store your backups.
• Who administers the backups? Will they need training?
• What software and hardware are required for purchase?
• How frequently backups will run?
• Will staff need training to use backup procedures?

What Data You Need to Backup and How Frequently

The first step is to prioritize the order in which you backup your data. The order in which you backup will be determined by how important a data set is.

• High Priority data such as financial records, accounts, running projects, address books and emails which are absolutely crucial need special attention, backups should be made daily, and tests should be run in order to test the validity of backups.
• Low Priority data such as downloadable software, videos, images and installed applications can be backup up less frequently as they are less urgent and can be replaced without backups.
• Legal Requirements dictate that certain financial records must be backup. They also dictate how data is stored for live use as well as backup archives.

It’s also worth bearing in mind, that data should be backed up according to the frequency of use. There will always be certain files in any organization which change several times every day, and other files that do not change at all (e.g. accounts which change every day should be backed up at the close of business every day).

High Priority Data

A simple test to find out if files qualify as “high priority” is to ask yourself if you could do without the said files. Would you be at a significant loss if you lost your client list, order inquiries, or purchase invoices? Chances are the answer would be a “yes” so they should be regarded as high priority.

Accounts, spreadsheets, and other important data should be organized in logical folders following a descriptive tree structure to facilitate in the backup process.

Emails should be backed up weekly, in case they are hacked or important emails are accidentally deleted. Most email providers will provide POP3 or IMAP connectivity enabling you to download all the emails with a client like Thunderbird to create local backups, other web based email providers will enable you to create backups at source and download the entire archive.

Before backing up emails, it’s wise to clear out spam. This must be done carefully to avoid deleting non-spam emails.

Emails are often overlooked, but can be very useful several years later. They often contain important contacts that you will need to refer to years later, help with auditing, etc.

Lower Priority Data

Any outdated files, images, videos etc which aren’t urgent needs can be permanently deleted from the disk to free up drive space. Necessary files that aren’t crucial, but still help with the functioning should be backed up weekly or monthly.

Legal Compliance

State Laws on data retention requirements as well as data protection are always evolving alongside technological advances. It’s important to look up local laws in regards to data protection, freedom of information, privacy bills and information regulations to find out what your exact legal obligations are on what data to store and how.

Hardware Required for Successful Backups

Hardware required for backups is inexpensive, and in many cases the users will already have the necessary hardware in place to start performing backups.

To begin, users need to roughly work out how much space a typical backup will require. Software like Acronis True Image will compress the backup down to 50-80% of the space it takes up on your drives, however users will need much more space in order to keep 2-3 previous versions of backups in order to create a second safety net in case a more recent backup fails.

• How much capacity does each user folder take up?
• What is the size of their email archive?

Furthermore, data storage requirements tend to grow exponentially over time, so you will need to have 4x more data capacity than you need in order to future proof your hardware.

External Drive Backups

Currently, hard drives are cheap. They typically run on USB 2.0 and firewire connectivity, although firewire is set to be phased out in favor of USB 3.0 which is more accessible and faster than firewire.

Advantages

Cheap to buy, highly compatible and easy to use, frequently come bundled with backup software allowing users to back up straight out of the box.

Disadvantages

Ideal for backing up a single computer, or one computer at a time, these drives tend to use the same technology as internal hard drives, and are prone to data corruption from dropping the devices and from contact with magnetic instruments, although many do have built in magnetic shields.

You can view a list of great deals on external hard drives here.

Network Attached Storage

Network Attached Storage (NAS) are LAN based storage systems which can be connected to via any computer on the network.

Advantages

NAS are simply an extension to the external drive backups discussed earlier. A hard drive is connected directly to the router, instead of an individual computer. It’s inexpensive and enables every user to access the drive. After the drive is mapped on to a terminal, software applications like Acronis can make whole drive backups or individual file/folder backups straight onto the NAS, meanwhile the drive is still accessible by others.

Disadvantages

Can impair network performance when backup is taking place, and leaves the NAS open to accidental deletion by end users. NAS should be an intermediary backup for an IT technician to make more secure archives later.

Online Storage

Online storage has become a viable option to backup large amounts of data, thanks to fast internet connectivity. Online backup services have been largely designed for consumers in mind to store music, documents, and small zip files, however with increasing emphasis on data security and encryption as well as adherence to regulatory bodies, online storage is fast becoming useful for small businesses to store backups on a highly secure offsite server.

Advantages

Free 5GB accounts available with highly regarded services like SugarSync and OpenDrive. Manual services like Skydrive offer 25GB. With the installation of the backup utility, users can begin to automatically backup their files on the fly. For a small price of $5 users can get unlimited backup storage allowance from services like Carbonite.

Disadvantages

Unsuitable for large files, as upload speeds are limited by your Internet connection. Not suitable as main backup source as files and folders of backups and constantly modified and risk of corruption is present. Regulation may also prohibit use of online storage as primary or sole backup method for business related documents.

Administration and Liability

It must be noted that responsibility for making backups ultimately lies with the owner; therefore, owners will need to take adequate measures to create a fail safe backup mechanism. Unfortunately, despite all the promises made by online backup services, if the backups do go wrong, the responsibility still comes down to an owner.

This is why it’s paramount to use a variety of different backup methods. Online backup as well as secure local backups should be performed, and the backup drives should ideally be detached from the network when not in use to prevent accidental deletion.

Scheduled Backups

The technician can elect to create scheduled backups. On a weekly basis the technician will gather all the files and archive them in order to allow the files to be recovered in case the files are lost or deleted.

The backup software will have tools available to test the backup in order to make sure that it works properly. This must always be performed, in order to make sure you have a workable backup with which you can restore your files.

Automated Backups

Software like Norton Ghost allows automation of the backup procedure. The software runs in the memory of each computer and keeps a record of file changes, and then on a daily or weekly basis any additional changes made to the system are updated on the backups. The software can be set up to create daily or weekly backups of the system or just user files.

Windows has its own built in backup program which can be found by typing backup in the search box. Mac users are able to download the backup utility from the Apple website.

However, a commercial backup solution is more preferable due to the flexibility offered. Worthy contenders for the best Windows backup software are Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, and Paragon Drive Backup.

About the author: Abdul Karim is a tech geek and a full time network administrator. In his spare time he writes about online backup services, and enjoys swimming and salsa dancing.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The Definitive Guide To Creating A Data Backup Strategy

Most modern web browsers will dump all your downloads, as in the files you click to download (meaning not the cache) to a specific folder titled Downloads. Windows Vista and 7 to the best of my knowledge have this folder auto-created by the OS itself. Older versions of Windows will usually have a folder called Downloads created under My Documents. Or it could be the situation where you specify your own downloads folder. In any case, it’s most likely true you dump all your downloads to just one folder.

The downloads folder over time will turn into a mess and at times will be difficult to tell one file from the other. The tips below will help you organize that monster into something more manageable.

1. Separate installer files from everything else

Most people only download 4 types of files. Installers, images, video and documents (PDFs, DOCs, etc.)

Documents and multimedia files are easy to navigate through because most if not all of them can be previewed as your viewing the file list if you utilize a thumbnail view.

Installer files on the other hand have no preview function because that’s not the nature of the way they work, so when you download an installer regardless of what it is, all installer files should be sent to a subfolder of Downloads. The easiest way to do this is to create the subfolder Apps, and just put all your installers there.

2. Get in the habit of renaming installer files once downloaded

There is no standard naming convention when it comes to installer files, and if you download apps quite a bit, chances are there’s a bunch of setup.exe files in your downloads folder. You’ll see setup.exe, setup.exe(1), setup.exe(2) and so on. All different apps, different installers.

If the installer file you download doesn’t have a descriptive file name, rename it. Go to your downloads folder, right-click the installer file, select to rename, and give it a descriptive title that you can recognize should you have to come back to it later.

Does renaming a downloaded installer file affect how it installs?

In Windows, no it doesn’t. In most other OSes it doesn’t affect the installer either.

3. Sort by "Date Modified"

The bigger your downloads folder gets, the more sorting by name becomes fairly worthless. After a while it’s just easier to sort by Date Modified, with the most recent downloaded file shown at the top of the file list.

In Windows, the Date Modified column should be enabled by default. If it isn’t, you can right-click anywhere in the column area and enable it:

After that you can click the column to sort. Click the column name until you see a down-arrow next to it, and that will put the latest file at the top of the file list.

4. Put images in the images folder instead of the downloads folder

Images really don’t belong in the downloads folder. In the Windows environment there’s a specific folder dedicated to this task called My Pictures.

To mass-select images in your downloads folder for cut/paste the easy way:

1. Enable the ‘Type’ column (the same way Date Modified is enabled as shown above)
2. Sort by file Type by clicking the column
3. Scroll through your file list and find the images
4. Click the first image, scroll down, hold SHIFT, click the last image, let go of SHIFT
5. Press CTRL+X to cut. The files will then turn slightly transparent, indicating they’re ready to be moved.
6. Navigate to your My Pictures folder, open it, then right click anywhere INSIDE the My Pictures folder and select Paste.

While most images on the internet are in JPG or JPEG format, you may have some stray GIF, PNG and BMP files in your download folder, so be sure to look for those as well.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

4 Ways To Organize Your Cluttered Downloads Folder

Let’s say you’re on YouTube, and you see a video you really like. It’s downright awesome, and you think “Hey, I’d love to put that on my iPod.” Believe it or not, you actually can do that. Some time ago, I stumbled across a very, very useful tool known as the YouTube Downloader. It’s pretty much what’s written on the box. It lets you download YouTube videos and even convert them to mp3 format. Rather awesome, no?

Of course, it goes without saying that the potential for copyright infringement while using this tool is pretty damned high. To that end, I caution anyone who happens to download it: make sure whatever video you’re downloading isn’t copyrighted and that regardless of which video you’re ripping from YouTube, it’s for personal use only.  Chances are, if a video uses a song from a well-known artist or group, that material’s copyrighted. If it’s an original, unique work, you’re probably in the clear.

You can download the YouTube downloader here. Don’t bother purchasing it. The free version works just fine.

Happy listening!

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Watch YouTube Videos Offline With The YouTube Downloader

Is there a way I could access a webcam that is hooked up to a desktop computer in my home network with a different desktop computer in the same home network? I would like to monitor what is going on downstairs from the computer that is upstairs! I would think this should be similar to accessing a printer that is hooked up to a different computer on the home network.

The hard way would be to use remote desktop software where you load the entire desktop (such as with LogMeIn), but the frame rate will be very slow.

The semi-easy way would be to use the iSpy software which includes iSpy Server. I say “semi-easy” because setting it up isn’t exactly a simple 1-2-3 process. This isn’t to say it’s difficult, but you do have to know the basics of how to set up a server. In other words, if you know how to set up a wireless router, you can get the iSpy Server set up in about 10 to 30 minutes, depending on your skill level.

For those wondering, yes, iSpy is free; it’s open source. In addition to PC use, you can even use iSpy from an iPad or iPhone, so you can cover all the bases, so to speak.

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How To Access A Webcam Over The Network